Intermezzo: Jean Marais' quiff

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Sometimes a much-loved classic film can have one thing, just one little tiny thing, that jars every time. A thing that makes you think “How did that get in? What a pity.” Not a continuity or authenticity mistake, so-called bloopers — they’re just part of the rich texture of cinema. What we’re looking at here are things that unaccountably trigger disappointment or irritability every time and out of all proportion to their significance.
 
In the case of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, it’s Jean Marais’ quiff.
 
Fair enough, it’s 1949. Elvis’s first single is only a few years over the horizon – have a quiff. You’re playing an established poet who’s trying to look cool among the Left Bank kids, so a quiff should work. But this isn’t a quiff. It’s a QUIFF. The quiff seems to precede Marais’ face by several frames wherever he goes. Once seen, it’s impossible to look at anything else. It should have its own credit, as should the quiffs in Aki Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboy films.
 
Admittedly, Édouard Dermit as Cégeste can also be said to carry a quiff. But Dermit is actually playing one of the Left Bank kids that Orpheus is trying to look cool among, and what’s more he's wearing appropriate trousers to prove it.
 
Marais got by just fine as the Beast in Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête with no quiff at all, and as Avenant and the Prince in the same film with a modest almost-quiff that confined itself to a respectable position to the rear of his eyebrow line. Returning to play a wandering Oedipus in Le testament d'Orphée, the 1960 sequel to Orphée, Marais appears (sticklers for Classical authenticity will be relieved to hear) without eyes but in a wig that looks as though its main purpose is to forcibly suppress his own quiff. The whole thing had obviously got out of control by then.
 
A fine example of Cocteau’s love of in-camera trickery occurs in one of the between-worlds Zone scenes in Orphée. Heurtebise, played by François Perier, and Orpheus are moving toward camera in slight slow motion. Heurtebise, in front, appears to be advancing effortlessly while Orpheus seems to be impeded by some unseen force, but it is Heurtebise’s hair and costume that are ruffled by a powerful wind, a wind which has no similar effect on Orpheus. To convince us that they nevertheless occupy the same magical space, a street glazier crying his wares passes across the foreground and then moves towards and beyond Orpheus. But in spite of this trick of perception with the glazier we’re not thinking, “Magic! Look, an unearthly wind is buffeting Heurtebise but not Orpheus”. No. We’re thinking — “Back projection! Back projection! Look at his quiff not moving. Look at it!”.
 
In Cocteau’s version of the myth, Orpheus is moderately fond of his wife Euridice but falls madly in love with the supernatural agent of his own demise. The styling and costuming of Marie Casarés’s Princess represent everything that a quiff is not. She is the immortal anti-quiff. Death, the slayer of quiffs. A goth shape-shifter with a mocking smile never far from her lips, her jet black hair scraped tightly back in defiance of the very possibility of a quiff.
 
So maybe Marais’ hair stylist was actually onto something after all. Orphée est un quiff ou il n'est rien. That line must have got cut.

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FILMS
Jean Cocteau: La Belle et la Bête (1946), Orphée (1949), Le testament d'Orphée (1960).
Aki Kaurismäki: Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989), Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses (1994), The Total Balalaika Show (1994).